A 16-year-old youth from Shopian was among the three militants who were gunned down in an encounter on Sunday.

Faisal Gulzar, a resident of Chitragam village, had last week gone missing from his home after going out to get grocery. He had joined Al-Badr outfit, police said.
On Saturday evening, when three militants were trapped in an encounter in Shopian, Faisal made a call to his father, seeking the forgiveness of parents.
“He told his father that he was trapped in the encounter and that he was not going to surrender,” a family member said, wishing anonymity.
After police learnt that the juvenile was trapped in the cordon, they brought his parents and sisters to the site of the encounter to convince their son to surrender.
“The other two militant associates of Faisal didn’t allow him to come out and surrender despite sincere efforts by the security forces to persuade him,” IGP Kashmir Vijay Kumar said.
Faisal is not the first juvenile militant to have perished in Kashmir insurgency. 15-year-old Faizan Bhat, a resident of Tral, was a student of 10th standard before joining militancy.
He died in a gunfight in May 2017 three months after he had picked up a gun.
Similarly, Fardeen Khanday, another class 10 student, was part of a fidayeen (suicide) squad of Jaish-e-Mohammad, which launched a pre-dawn attack on the CRPF’s training-cum-induction centre at Lethpora in Pulwama in December 2017.
In December 2018, Mudassir Rashid from Hajin town of north Kashmir’s Bandipora district became the youngest slain militant in the three-decade insurgency in Kashmir. He was killed along with another juvenile militant Saqib Bilal Sheikh (17) on the outskirts of Srinagar city.